10 most populous countries that have birthright citizenship: list
1. United States
With an estimated population of 349 million people, the U.S. is the most populous country that grants automatic citizenship to people born within its territory, with some exceptions.
The basis for this principle stems from the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
According to the immigration activist organization, the American Immigration Council, “This constitutional guarantee was intentionally written to ensure equality under the law, regardless of race, ancestry, or parentage.”
“It was enacted to overturn the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which had declared that black people born in the United States could never be citizens.”
The concept was further solidified by the 1898 Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, where the high court ruled 6 to 2 that a person born in California was a U.S. citizen, even though his parents were Chinese nationals.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving jurist on the Supreme Court, characterized the 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Barbara as another chapter in “the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Similarly, Justice Samuel Alito described the ruling as “a serious mistake.”
“As interpreted by the Court today, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home,” he wrote.
